QURAS is Postponing the Trusted Setup Ceremony

Hello all,
Thank you for your continued support of the QURAS project.

Unfortunately, we need to announce the postponement of the Trusted Setup Ceremony (hereafter referred to simply as the “ceremony”).

We had planned to hold the ceremony after a code audit of the blockchain engine by a third party company.

However, the impact of the new coronavirus made it difficult for teams to work together, resulting in delays in development.

In addition, we were unable to hold the ceremony in the way we had originally planned, so our project was looking for a new way to hold it.

In an effort to find new ways to do this, we contracted an outside firm that specializes in privacy protection technology to conduct an audit.

The audit revealed that the implementation of zk-SNARKs needs to be changed to ensure the quality of the ceremony.

At the same time, it was discovered that the method of the ceremony we had originally planned was not safe enough.

Essentially, the ceremony is intended to ensure that anonymous transactions using zk-SNARKs are not exposed to unauthorized disclosure to third parties.

Therefore, ensuring them is a necessary part of making our mainnet available to the public.

We concluded that there is no justification for releasing the mainnet to the public when QURAS’s anonymous transactions are untrustworthy. Then, we decided to postpone the recently scheduled ceremony and change the implementation of zk-SNARKs.

However, realistically, it is difficult to postpone the mainnet start any further. Therefore, we will first release the mainnet as a blockchain that implements only the Ring Signature.

As part of the process for the recent mainnet release, zk-SNARKs will be removed and the changes will be re-audited.

It’s been a long time since our last announcement, and we apologize for that.

At this time, in order to promptly inform you of our decision, this announcement does not describe any specific plans for the future.

Details will be announced at a later date.

Thank you.

Take care,
QURAS team